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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:57
Global Warming Skepticism | Warren Meyer and Stefan Moyneux
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Hello, everybody.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have on the line the most esteemed Warren Meyer, who is one of the, I think fair to say, experts on global warming skepticism.
And by that, if I understand you correctly, you do not mean that you doubt the, what is it, 0.6 degree global warming that seems to have occurred over the past sort of half century or 60 years or so.
You don't doubt that that has occurring.
But there are some particular aspects of the environmental or Al Gore-ish kind of case that you have particular issues with.
The first is that carbon dioxide does not appear to be, or at least there's no proof that it's the key ingredient.
That's the first.
The second is that there's no proof that it's man-made.
And third, and perhaps most importantly, there seems to be little to no proof, in fact some counter evidence, that it's going to be catastrophic, even if we accept that it's carbon dioxide and it's man-made.
The third part of the puzzle is whether or not it's going to be catastrophic.
And if I understand your arguments correctly, Warren, you take great exception to these three points.
Exactly.
Thank you for having me on.
One of the things that I think you know, and your listeners will know, is it's popular to call skeptics climate change deniers, or somehow work the deniers in, because it evokes the term Holocaust denier and somehow casts skepticism as an equally untenable position that shouldn't even be, you know, allowed in the public dialogue.
In fact, in certain countries like Germany, Holocaust denial is actually illegal.
It's one restriction on speech that is legal there.
And I think people are trying to evoke the same thing.
And I said in my last video, I said, I'm willing to accept the denier as long as you're clear what I'm denying.
I don't deny...
What I like to call it is, it's really anthropogenic or man-made catastrophic global warming theory, and all three of those matter.
You have to have the global warming that comes back to this notion that we've sort of abandoned global warming and talked about climate change.
We can come back to that, but really climate change can't happen from CO2 unless you have the warming.
I don't really deny some warming.
I don't even deny that some of the warming may be man-made, though I think it's a lot smaller number.
What I deny is the catastrophe.
I don't think it's going to be Five, six, eight degrees Celsius of warming from man-made or anthropogenic CO2.
And that's where my difference comes in and why I really started my site.
Just as quick background, I'm really a journalist like you.
I see my role, I have a science background in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and it's actually in an area of control theory that has a lot to do with the stability of dynamic systems and feedback effects, which we'll get a chance to talk about a lot because that's a key failure point of the catastrophic forecast.
But I really have always seen my role as a journalist in trying to take the science and in this case take the skeptic side of the science and give it a broader hearing and really try to explain it to laymen because I know that some of this stuff can get pretty complicated.
I think that you're doing an excellent, excellent job of that and I also wanted to really thank you for making the extraordinary amount of material and just to pimp your website for a second to make sure that people can go and get to the source data.
climate-skeptic.com.
Is that right?
Exactly.
Thank you.
I appreciate your clarification of the term denier.
It sort of feels like when you are a climate change skeptic that you're sort of one level above holocaust deniers and perhaps one and a half levels above people who believe in the flat earth or who deny things like evolution.
So I'm glad that you clarified that.
It is strange to me that a skepticism about highly conjectural source data should be considered anti-scientific when it seems to me that the scientific method is entirely predicated on the rigorous application of skepticism, particularly to projected or modeled data.
Exactly, and I think it leaves a lot of people confused because I think they, to some extent on scientific issues, if you're not involved in the depth of it, it's hard not to let other people's conviction You know, influence you.
You know, if you're surrounded by all these people that seem so passionately convinced of something, and then saying words like, the science is settled, and you don't have the time or the capability to really dig into that, it's sometimes difficult to know what to do in that situation or really to fight it.
And I think a lot of people, one question a lot of people ask is, how can so many people be so passionate about it being settled science, When you're saying it's not at all settled and I think the key is I always find that nobody Everybody I hate the word liar in the in the political context.
It's used way too much.
I don't think anybody's Almost seldom just blatantly outright lying though.
There's some of that in the world.
I think you can always look to say Where's the grain of truth on each side and the key the explanation became for me when I started investigating was when I really discovered that that this whole notion of co2 driven Warming or co2 driven climate change is at least a two-part chain theory.
There's two chain parts of the chain there's initial part that says co2 causes some warming and And then there's a part of the chain that says there are factors in the climate system, and we can get back to this called feedback, but there's factors in the climate system that actually multiply that initial warming many, many times.
And so it turns out that it is right to say it's fairly settled that CO2 causes some warming, because I think you can prove that in a lab, and we know that the Earth is warmer than it would be without greenhouse gases in its atmosphere.
We'd be like Mars.
We'd be a much colder planet.
So we know that We know that to be true.
So there is a core of, I hate the word settled, but there is a core of quote-unquote settled science in here that CO2 does, as a greenhouse gas, does somewhat warm the earth.
We don't know.
We haven't got to how much.
Most alarmist scientists will say that that initial warming from CO2 is very small.
It might be one degree over the next century.
But there's this feedback effect that there's conditions in the climate that will tend to multiply that initial warming by six or seven or eight times.
In other words, the climate is a car sitting on top of a mountain.
And if you give it a little bit of a nudge, it'll start rolling down that hill catastrophically and crash at the bottom.
And so it's really a two-part theory.
And in fact, the catastrophe comes not from greenhouse gas theory.
That only gets you one degree.
The catastrophe comes from the theory that the climate is this car balanced on the top of the mountain, ready to run away.
And that second theory is the one that is very weak, in terms of fact-based evidence, and the one that most skeptics criticize, and why we can say that, yes, there's a core of settled science, but we seriously doubt the catastrophe.
Well, and of course, just from a layperson perspective, if our climate were this car poised, teetering really, on its axles on the top of a cliff, you would think that it would have tipped at some point over the past few billion years and we wouldn't have the relatively stable climate that we have.
Yeah, exactly.
If you zoom in on these graphs, it looks really, really crazy, but then as you say, when you put back to the general range of temperatures, it is pretty much a flat line.
A system can't have ended up this stable if it were that precarious, in my opinion.
That's absolutely what the point that a lot of skeptics make is say it is – you have – and by the way, for folks, just so you could translate some of the words you hear, when we talk about a car rolling down the hill like this, this is the sort of tipping point effect you hear from folks like Al Gore or James Hansen.
When they talk about tipping points, they're talking about runaway positive feedback.
And we can talk about runaway positive feedback a little later when we delve a little deeper, maybe.
But when they talk about a tipping point, they really are talking about the climate Precariously balanced such that the smallest nudge will throw it down the hill and and really I think they will all admit that co2 itself Which is a weak greenhouse gas, really only provides a nudge.
That's what it does.
But it's the fact that we're on the top of this hill and rolling downhill.
And why it hasn't rolled down the hill in the past is a key question.
It's even more interesting because, sort of a cognitive dissonance, you have folks like Michael Mann who have really made a career of trying to portray the last thousand years of history as being incredibly stable.
He's trying to say temperatures have been almost dead flat for a thousand years, and therefore there's something anomalous about the recent warming.
This is the famous hockey stick graph.
Well, if you really bought that, which I think there's a lot of reasons not to believe that picture anymore, but if you really bought that, you'd have to say, well, geez, how is that consistent with your other notion that climate is dominated by positive feedback, that it has tipping points, that it's precariously balanced on the top of the hill.
I mean, because a system that's dominated by positive feedbacks and even tipping points is going to show wild fluctuations, the slightest change in the sun or anything else, is going to cause wild fluctuations in the temperature.
And so at the same time they're saying that you should see this wildly fluctuating behavior, they're also saying we're not seeing this wildly fluctuating behavior.
And so it's a very odd situation.
Right.
I mean, you could almost say that psychologically it's a projection of the fragility of the theory rather than the actual speed of the temperature.
I mean that's obviously pure speculation but one of the things that got me first interested, and I've been I guess occasionally blogging and videographing about my skepticism for at least four or five years on climate change, one of the things that kind of drew me, I come from the business world and in particular the software world as an entrepreneur, that was sort of my past incarnation, And the hockey stick graph looked way too much like madcap projected sales revenues to me to be believable.
But one thing I found that's very interesting when you look at a lot of the graphs that go back in time, as you point out, it's really only since the seventies that we've been having access to satellite data and even semi-reliable temperatures have only been around for a hundred or so years.
But it's kind of like in business you have your actual sales and then you have your projected sales.
But In the world of climate change, it's almost like the reverse, because you have your actual temperatures.
And again, I know there's lots of problems with the positioning of the recording stations, which we should, I think, get into.
But you have your actual temperatures, and then going further back, you have your projected temperatures.
And in the business world, nobody would say with certainty that the projected sales, particularly if they're very different from the existing or recent trends in sales, that the projected sales are solid.
compared to the ones that already exist.
But in the world of climate change you can have these apples and oranges comparisons, right?
The comparisons between mostly real recorded data and sheer seat-of-the-pants projections and combine these two seamlessly and then drop the ones that don't fit.
And that to me is the apples to oranges comparisons that really began to raise my skepticism way back in the day.
Yeah, and you really see that in two ways, because it's funny.
As you say, it's a funny business because everybody uses forecasts and models to try to project forward.
We just don't have a choice.
But this is a funny business that uses forecasts and models to recreate history, too.
And so you actually get some parallel problems Oddly enough, between the way they measure history and the way they project forward.
That's why, you know, this whole brouhaha surrounding the email release from the East Anglia University is sometimes hard to figure out, because what they're talking about, because people say, well, are they talking about their past temperatures, or are they talking about their climate models for the future?
And the answer is yes, because they tend to have the exact, interestingly, they often have Have the exact same problem, isn't it?
And that was the problem I had from the hockey stick from the very beginning, is you have this line that's flat historically, and that's actually from one dataset.
The flat historically number is actually from tree rings or ice cores, and the first one was from tree rings.
And for those who don't know, what they do with tree rings is you're always looking for a natural process to figure out historical temperatures that layer.
Because then you can say each layer is a different year or a different decade, and then we can associate any information in that layer with a certain time.
And so tree rings layer by year.
They have a ring for each year.
And they hypothesize that trees grow more or less when it's warmer or colder.
And so you can look at the width of the tree rings to try to recreate temperatures.
Now, trees don't make very good thermometers.
You could probably guess that because a lot of things affect tree growth.
But nevertheless, this is how they did it.
And they came up with these lines from the tree rings that said, well, temperatures are really flat.
And then they splice on a completely different data set, which is the measurement of temperature with thermometers, the way we do it now.
And the inflection point between those, the hockey stick, the place where it goes from flat to pointing up, Is that actual point where they come together is where the two data sets meet.
So, which raises the question, are you actually measuring anything real, or do you just have a discontinuity between your two data sets?
Because anytime I see an inflection point when you've melded two data sets, I'm immediately suspicious that it has more to do with the data splicing than it does anything else.
And then you have the same thing going to the future, too.
And so, there's a lot of There's a lot of oddball science that goes into some of this stuff.
Sorry to interrupt, but haven't they also done work to continue the data set by looking at the tree rings or the ice core samples and found that it does not match the recorded temperatures?
Oh yeah, I'm sorry.
What they've done is they initially took some tree rings and one of the things you'll see is The tree rings don't read a temperature.
You've got to calibrate them.
matches really well to the temperatures.
And you say, well, that looks like it's a good thermometer.
But what you don't realize is the tree rings don't read a temperature.
You've got to calibrate them.
So you have to have some period where you have both tree rings and thermometer temperatures.
And so what you do is for 50 years, say from 1900 to 1950, you say whatever the tree rings grew will correlate that to whatever the thermometer said the temperature went up.
Okay, so you actually, the only reason that they look a lot similar between 1900 and 1950, say, They're like a dog on a leash, I say.
So it's no surprise that the dog stays close to its master, you know, that the proxies, the tree rings stay close to real temperatures during that period because they're on a leash.
They're forced to be equal mathematically.
But then you let them off the leash in 1950, and they went back and they resampled the tree rings.
And what they found is temperatures kept going up.
We know that it's going up 2, 3, 4, 5 tenths of a degree Celsius over the last 50 years.
But the tree rings didn't show the temperatures going up, at least by the way they were reading the tree rings.
In fact, in several of them, they actually showed the temperature going down.
And so this is a phenomenon called divergence.
And that doesn't mean that the tree rings are right and the thermometers are wrong, that somehow temperatures That's not the point of it.
The point of that is to say, if the tree rings in its first outing, you know, like the pitcher in the first game of the season, if the tree rings are failing so badly the moment they get let off the leash, and they don't match current temperatures at all, not only do they not match, but they go in the opposite direction, then how can we trust What they're saying about the year 1300 or 1200 or 1000.
And so it's a real indictment of the quality of those things.
And the guys that published it knew it, which is part of this recent scandal, is they actually, when they published it, they actually cut off the end of the tree ring data.
They actually truncated it so it didn't show the decline, and so the divergence was hidden when the data was used in things like the IPCC reports.
Right.
And that is a pretty egregious mishandling of information.
I mean, we all have confirmation bias and we all have.
And that's exactly why you need peer review, wide publication, access to source data and the algorithms.
And it seems to me that to be labeled some sort of irrational skeptic when the reality is that when MacIntyre, I think his name is, the Canadian who's been pursuing this data for many years, whenever the source data is released, It proves to be a counter to the graphs.
That's not skepticism, that's just reality.
And the other thing that I think is important, and you mentioned in your 2007 video, is that the huge amount of corrections that are needed for things like urbanization and change of land use, agriculturalization and so on, that the algorithms from, I think it's from NASA and the UN, have not been released for peer review.
And that seems to me It's something that should raise the alarm bells of anyone.
If you have the source data which itself is unreliable and then you apply all of these algorithms in pursuit of a thesis and then you refuse to release the algorithms to peer review, I mean I can't imagine how you would take any of that seriously as an outside observer.
Yeah, and just as a quick background, I have a lot of the same background that you mentioned before.
I actually was a business and econometrics modeler and forecaster for a number of Fortune 50 companies, and unfortunately, and I'll just admit this, I'm perfectly aware of what games one can play with models and stuff.
And FM sales projections, too.
You can get whatever answer out of these things you want and nobody from the outside without digging into it is going to be able to tell the difference.
But going to your point about...
about the corrections.
One of the first things I did in this project was a guy named Anthony Watt in California, a meteorologist, was sponsoring a study and he wanted everybody to get out and sort of crowdsourcing, go out and actually photograph and catalog their Nearby measurement stations.
So the US Historical Climate Network, and I assume Canada has something similar, has about a thousand stations.
So they said, let's get my readers to go out and photograph these things.
And that's what I actually did, is I photographed in most of the measurement sites within Arizona.
And the very first one I did, this photograph's been all over the place, was actually at the University of Arizona.
And there's actually a sign on it that says, proudly operated by the University of Arizona meteorology staff for the National Weather Service, or I think actually for the NOAA.
It's sitting in an asphalt parking lot.
I mean, so you have a temperature device that's supposed to be free of biases and that's really measuring temperature.
And this is the Tucson station.
And the reason I'd gone to it in the first place is that Tucson in the U.S.
climate network data showed the most warming of any other station in the country over the last hundred years.
So I said, let's go look at it.
Well, this thing's sitting in an asphalt parking lot, which means during the night that asphalt, which has absorbed heat all during the day, radiates it right back on the thermometer.
There's buildings all around it that block airflow.
And so this thing's average temperature of the day is going to be much higher than it would be if it was sitting out in an open field, which is what it was in the year 1900, because Arizona, where I live, wasn't even a part of the United States.
It wasn't even a state in 1900.
That's how deserted it was.
And so it goes from sitting in a field to sitting in an asphalt parking lot.
I want to give a slight background just for those who are sort of jumping in midstream to this debate.
The weather stations are supposed to be away from urban areas because, of course, urban areas generate a lot of heat.
They're supposed to be in natural environments and away from any heat sources.
So to put them in a parking lot or next to an air conditioning outtake which is where you've seen some of it.
That was the first one Anthony found.
It's going to give a highly exaggerated increase in reading particularly if it's located in an area where urbanization has grown up around the data set around the 20th century.
It's going to give you vastly escalated readings which is going to give you an indication of general warming when all it's recording is the presence of heat emitting substances like tarmac or air conditioners or fires around it.
So that's going to give you a very misleading trend relative to where it started.
Yeah, you said fires.
He found one where, which I think you're probably thinking about, where the thermometer is about five feet from a trash burn barrel in this dump area, this apartment, where the apartment burns its trash right next to the official temperature station three times a week, which I always thought was funny.
Which is sort of the rough equivalent of installing smoke alarms and then holding lighters underneath them and saying, gosh, I can't believe how much my house is on fire.
I can't get all these false alarms.
I don't understand.
My son and I actually did a, I don't know, two things so that y'all can get a feel for it.
If any of y'all live in a city, you will often hear a forecast, and you'll particularly hear this at night for the low temperature because that's where you get the biggest effect.
You'll hear a forecast that might be You know, it's going to be 20 degrees in the city and 14 degrees in the outlying areas.
And that's a very typical forecast that you might see in a large city, at least here in the States, that they'll always say that the city is going to be warmer tonight than the outlying areas.
And that's from the urban heat island effect.
My son and I actually measured it from a science project.
We actually strapped a thermocouple and a GPS device, both with uh, timestamps on them to the top of the car.
And we drove around the town and, and graphed it and found the difference between the center of Phoenix in the evening.
And the outlying area of Phoenix was between seven degrees Fahrenheit or between, you know, four and six degrees Celsius, um, just from driving 20 miles.
And so that's the kind of biases any thermometer that's sitting in the middle of the city is going to have.
And the key thing of it is not that it has a bias, because if it was always there, then we're really only looking for a warming signal.
So So, if it was always there, you'd say, okay, that's no big deal.
But the key problem is, 100 years ago, Phoenix and Tucson were open fields.
I mean, there was nothing here.
I can't tell you how deserted Arizona was.
And so, you're going from measuring a temperature 100 years ago that was very likely in an open field with no asphalt and no cars and no industry, to being in the center of a 10-degree heat bubble.
And that's going to bias that signal upwards.
The signal-to-noise ratio, which engineers talk about a lot, if the signal is a half degree of warming and the noise is 10 degrees of urban heat island effect, that's a terrible signal-to-noise ratio.
Because people argue, well, we can correct for it.
Well, you can't, because if you're off by even You know, if the signal is 5% of what you're trying to correct for, that means if you're off by even 5% in what's really a guess of how much to correct that urban bias, you know, because you're going to say, well, I'll subtract 6 degrees or 7 degrees or 3 degrees, but if you're off by even a little bit in that guess, then you've exceeded the very signal you're trying to measure.
Well, yeah, and that's very true, that almost all of the calculations that are done in these model scenarios have variances of error, or potential for variances of error, Hugely greater than the 0.6 degrees that it's actually been trying to measure.
It's sort of strange, like, you know, there are some places here in Canada or in Toronto, and I'm sure it's the same is true in the States, where you have warehouses that by day they're pretty empty or whatever, and then at night they'll be turned into raves, and you'll have like 500 people dancing a storm and sweating and all that kind of stuff, and it's like putting a temperature gauge in the middle of the afternoon when it's not used by anyone, and then putting another one in when there are 500 people dancing and saying, oh my god, look, global warming is happening!
There's an ambient heat source around that's affecting your measuring.
And the really odd thing, just to not spend too much time on the adjustments, but when I was looking at the adjustments, I said, okay, well, I wonder how much they're adjusting these stations downwards.
And it turns out that the average adjustment for U.S.
temperature stations over the last 50 years is actually upwards.
They're actually manually adding degrees to the temperature.
And so in the U.S., the half-degree global warming signal, they've added a half-degree over the last 50 years manually.
So the entire warming signal, in the United States at least, is all manual adjustments.
And so just to give another sense of the signal-to-noise ratio.
So, you know, the only thing we're really measuring is not an increase in temperature, but how well folks may be guessing about the manual result, about manual adjustments.
And if they're adding temperature rather than subtracting it, you know, assuming there's a cooling bias rather than a warming bias, I don't think their guesses are pretty, very good.
Right, it's the thing that sometimes happens in business where you mistake a spreadsheet for reality that is never a good thing.
Well, that's the climate model problem in spades.
And I think that this is also shored up by some of the data that you've presented which indicates that you can really only find global warming if you look at the urban measurements of temperature.
When you look at the rural measurements you can't find that, which again would indicate that all we're doing is measuring the rather obvious fact that when lots of people move in and build stuff, stuff gets warmer.
And I think, you know, I think the one thing I tell people is don't get hung up on too much on trying to deny that there's been any warming.
Because one of the things when you look at the ice core data that isn't kind of well understood, let me just give folks a view of, one possible view of what's happened to temperatures over the last thousand years.
It's generally thought that there is a warm period in the Middle Ages.
Certainly every European historian I've ever taken a course from thinks there's a warm period in the Middle Ages around 1000 AD.
Where there's actually a lot of prosperity.
Historically, warm periods have always led to prosperity.
And so, there's a medieval warm period around 1000 AD, though folks like Michael Mann are trying to erase that from the record.
And then there's a, most folks agree that there's a thing we call the Little Ice Age during the 1600s, early 1700s, ending around 1800, and which corresponded to a very dormant, for lack of a better word, period of the sun, where the sun showed very few sunspots. for lack of a better word, period of the sun, Sunspots are generally correlated to solar activity.
When the sun's more active, it usually has more spots.
When it's less active, it's usually cleaner of spots.
And there's a thing called the Maunder minimum, where during that same period of time, the sun had very, very few spots compared to history.
And so, there's a very, very cold period up to about 1800, and the interesting thing that I hadn't known until I was looking at ice core records a few years ago, is that actually may have been the coldest period in the last 5000 years, from 1600 to 1800.
And if you think about it, when did we invent the thermometer?
We invented the thermometer in the 1600s.
The British have a temperature record beginning in the 1750s.
The US starts having temperature records in the 1850s.
So we really started measuring temperatures for real, at perhaps the coldest history in the entire 5,000 year history of time, and the entire 5,000 year history of civilized man.
So, it should be unsurprising that we're seeing some warming.
It has warmed since the Little Ice Age.
And it was warming in 1850, and it was warming in 1900, and it was warming in 1950.
And so it has warmed some.
I think that the point is that a lot of these metrics are overestimating that warming, that we're confusing urban bias with real warming.
And I think a lot of the studies have shown, I think a good number is probably half the warming we've seen, maybe half of the 7 tenths of a degree C, may actually be urban biases rather than real warming.
But there's still several tenths of a degree, at least, warming signal in there.
And we shouldn't get hung up on trying to make it go away, because a recovery from the little ice age is perfectly natural.
Right, and to your point, I guess everybody feels tall when they're standing next to Danny DeVito, right?
And it's going to seem particularly warm if you calibrate according to the coldest couple of decades on record.
Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, not to go too far afield, but I'm always fascinated when you look at, people say, well, the oceans are rising, and they're rising two to three millimeters a year, and the glaciers are melting, and the glaciers have been Generally retreating, though there's a little bit of, they may be reversing of late, some of the European glaciers.
But glaciers have been generally retreating in the last decade.
But the reason that oceans have been rising and glaciers have been retreating in the year 2000 is because they were doing the same thing in 1980.
And the ocean was rising and glaciers were retreating in 1950.
And it was rising and retreating in the year 1900.
And it was rising and retreating in the year 1850.
There's been a continuous, almost linear rise of two to three millimeters a year in the ocean levels for 150 years, right out of the recovery from the Little Ice Age.
And there's been a continuous retreat of glaciers that perhaps has slowed of late, right since the end of the Little Ice Age.
And it's a constant phenomenon.
And if you were to blame the most recent retreat and ocean rise on global warming, then you're forced to sort of say, well, coincidentally, it was all doing the exact same thing naturally up to 1950.
And so I guess coincidentally, that natural process stopped at the exact same moment that CO2 took over and drove the warming that made the rest of it happen.
Occam's Ranger just tells you, you know, it's probably just a 200-year, you know, constant history.
And the same thing that was causing it to rise and melt in 1850 is the same thing that was causing it to rise and melt in 1990.
Right.
In one continuous history.
Right.
And I think that's a good point to talk a little bit about CO2 and its lack of effective candidacy as a catastrophic anthropogenic factor in global warming which is I guess that there are threefold arguments in and of course correct me anytime I go astray you are of course the expert but the first is that it's of course extraordinarily low concentration in the atmosphere and even if you double it it's still extraordinarily low a few hundredths of a percent.
The second is that it is a relatively weak relative to something like water vapor it is a relatively weak global warming agent or greenhouse gas I suppose And the third, which I found very interesting and I didn't know about before I watched your material, is that it follows the law of diminishing returns.
In other words, if you double the carbon dioxide, you don't end up with double the heat retaining capacity.
It diminishes, which of course is the exact opposite.
Everything that you see in global warming is like asymptotic almost, right?
I mean, it's just massively increased, whereas there is actually, it's the opposite kind of curve.
for excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Yeah, if you don't mind taking a step back, because I don't know where all the listeners are, just 30 seconds on what the greenhouse effect is, just so people understand.
And again, this is, what I'm about to say is all accepted.
I mean, we wouldn't be able to live on the planet if what I'm about to describe doesn't happen in some way, because it would look like Mars and not Earth.
But the Sun, typically the Sun radiates energy down to the Earth, And then the Earth re-radiates it on different frequencies in the infrared spectrum back into space.
And those have to balance.
I mean, it's just like, it's just basic, any kind of basic energy flow, that if those two don't balance, then the temperature is going to change, and the temperature is going to change until it brings them into balance.
So, if more is coming in than going out, the temperature is going to rise, and a rising, an object that's hotter actually radiates more back out, That's what tends to bring it back into balance.
Just so people know, it's sort of like if you take the plug out of your bathtub and pour water in at the same rate that it's going out, you end up with a constant level of water.
If less is going out, it's going to increase as more is going out.
So it's always going to reach some kind of equilibrium of that water level if what's going out is the same as what's coming in.
Exactly.
And so, what CO2 does is it doesn't change the fact that it still has to balance.
What greenhouse gases do is as the sun's – it doesn't affect the sun's radiation coming in, but as it's re-radiating out those frequencies of infrared, CO2 absorbs some of those frequencies of radiation, so actually takes on heat.
and kind of intercepts some of those frequencies, intercepts some of them, but not all of them.
That's why it's a diminishing return.
Intercepts some of that radiation going back, and it heats the CO2 up.
Now, what happens then is the CO2 then re-radiates.
It has to keep its temperature in balance.
So as it's absorbing heat, it's also re-radiating heat back out.
And some of that heat gets re-radiated back into space where it was going anyway, so it has no big effect.
But some of it gets re-radiated back down to the surface.
And so it's not a really good analogy, but if you think about what's happening, in some sense the heat's coming off the Earth.
It's trying to go back into space to cool the Earth.
It gets intercepted to some extent by the CO2, and some of that that's intercepted gets sent back down to the Earth.
And that causes an additional amount of radiation hitting the Earth, and so the temperatures of the Earth has to rise to regain the balance.
And as you said, CO2 is very weak on that.
Water is much stronger, and something like methane is even stronger yet.
And since it only absorbs certain frequencies, eventually its ability to absorb those frequencies gets saturated.
And the best analogy I've heard is like painting a window.
You have a clear window, and you shine a light through it, and all the light gets through.
If you paint it with a coat of paint, I don't know if you've ever seen it do that, but putting one coat of paint, and look on the other side, the window's still going to be translucent.
Some of that light still gets through that coat of paint.
You put a second coat of paint on, and it's going to be really dim, but maybe some of the light gets through.
Put a third coat of paint on, it's now opaque.
Now the light gets through.
And from then on in, you can keep adding coats of paint, and it's not going to change the theme, because all the light's already blocked.
And to some extent that's a good analogy for the diminishing return of CO2.
Right, right.
And so that, even if we are producing enough CO2 to affect the temperature, it seems to be that it's going to point in the opposite directions towards this snowballing escalation towards catastrophe with this sort of a positive reinforcement or positive feedback that you talk about that quite the opposite is true given the problem.
It's not like ozone because ozone of course hangs in the atmosphere and continues like the ozone depleting chemicals but that's not the case with carbon dioxide which is another reason why of course the sort of slide towards catastrophe is far less credible.
Yeah, and the one thing you should understand is, so now let's forget every other effect.
Let's assume nothing else happens.
So I'm going to leave out the thing we've been calling feedback, and then we can talk about feedback.
But if you assume nothing else happens, scientists and skeptics Actually are pretty good agreement on what the number is for warming from CO2 from that basic effect.
And most folks will accept the number around one degree Celsius of warming from a doubling of CO2.
And just to give you a sense, we're about 385 parts per million CO2.
A doubling is about what they think we'll be at at the end of the century.
So you can think of that as from that basic underlying effect About one degree Celsius.
Now, there's skeptics that argue that it's... there's some that argue that it's zero.
There's skeptics that argue, like, that I believe that Lord Monckton actually thinks it's more like a half.
But if you talk to folks like Spencer and Christie and and a lot of the actual scientists, I'm just a journalist, the actual scientists involved in this thing, they'll generally accept the number around one.
Now, that's not just a skeptic number, though, because if you go to the IPCC report, which is sort of the Bible of the alarmist community, they say it's one, too.
They include a formula in there.
It actually comes from Michael Mann, who's one of the high priests of the alarmist community, back in a study he did in 1998, and they give a formula.
But if you solve the formula, it basically says that the warming before you get to all these feedback effects from CO2 is something like, one, I think it works out to 1.2 degrees C per doubling, or about one degree a century.
Let me just clarify that.
So that is a straight line projection based on current trends.
Is it fair to say that that does not include some of the reactive elements within the biosphere such as additional CO2 driving additional plant life?
Exactly.
That's before any kind of reaction of the climate system either to dampen that effect or accelerate it.
So before any of those, what I call feedbacks, but those dampening and accelerating factors, because before we talk about clouds, and before we talk about methane, and before we talk about humidity from the ocean, and ice changes, and albedo, before we talk about all those effects, it's about a degree over before we talk about all those effects, it's about a degree over the next century, which is, by the way, about what we've warmed over the last century a
And I don't think if people hadn't told us we've warmed that much that many of us would have noticed it.
So anyway, so I actually think the final value when we get to all those feedback effects is going to be lower than one.
Other folks think it's going to be a lot higher.
But the basic quote-unquote settled science theory of greenhouse gases, even by the most alarmist Reckoning gets you a degree of warming over the next century.
It doesn't get you a catastrophe.
It gets you the nudge on the car on the top of the hill.
Right.
And that is, again, just to remind people, that is holding all other variables as constant, which is, of course, an insane thing to do when something is complex.
You can't do that in the climate.
So certainly we're over-simplifying, but I want folks to understand that One of the points I make a lot is that the catastrophe actually doesn't come from greenhouse gas theory.
Greenhouse gas theory only gets you at one degree.
It's the theories about how climate behaves when it's got a perturbation, when it's got a new forcing like that, how the climate behaves and reacts to that warming.
It's that theory and that set of theories that drives the catastrophe.
So greenhouse gas theory could be... That's the feedback aspect, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So greenhouse gas theory can be settled, but it doesn't get us a catastrophe.
The catastrophe comes from a completely different theory that is almost never, ever talked about in the media or the popular press, and that's the theory that the climate not only has positive feedbacks, because it does have some positive feedbacks, but its net effect, it is dominated by those positive feedbacks, that those positive feedbacks drive the system, and that's what most skeptics focus on as the key failure point of the catastrophic theory.
And what is, if you don't mind, what are some of the key factors of this, uh, oh my god, we're all gonna die, everybody's running down a hill screaming with their hair on fire, from a one degree temperature increase, what is the general theory that allows people to say that kind of stuff with a straight face?
So here's, here's, it's, it's, when I say positive feedback, you can think of amplification.
So there's some amplification that occurs that multiplies it, and then when you get to tipping point, you get to an extreme form of amplification, which could best be illustrated as when you get feedback, when you get what's actually called feedback, When you get that squeal in a speaker system, that the speaker system just goes crazy and goes to sort of infinite volume, as loud as it could possibly be, and blows out your ears.
That's sort of the system going from positive feedback amplification to runaway positive tipping point feedback in your amplifier.
Let me give you a couple examples in the climate system of what that might be.
And I'll give you the positive ones first, because I'll give their case first.
One positive one, which I agree is positive, though I don't think it's that large, is ice albedo.
And I'll tell you what that means.
When there's a lot of ice and snow cover in the world, that reflects sunlight back.
We've all been out in the snow, certainly up in Canada there you have, and you walk out on a sunny day when there's a lot of snow and ice on the ground, and you have to put your sunglasses on because it's like walking around in a big mirror.
Well, that's exactly how it works If you look at it from space, it looks like a big mirror.
And all this solar radiation comes in and gets, a lot more of it gets reflected back into space than it would if it hit a tree or grass or bare ground.
And so, as the world gets, the theory is as the world gets warmer, there's less snow and ice, there's less ocean sea ice, and so therefore with less ice, less sunlight gets reflected back, and therefore the world is even warmer from that second effect.
So there's a secondary effect of some warming causes less ice and snow, which causes the world to be less reflective, which causes even more warming.
And that's how feedback works, is some initial warming causes even more warming.
And ice is a very good example.
Sorry to clarify that, but wouldn't... I don't mean sorry to clarify that, but... I can use all the help I can get, so that's fine.
If some of the, say, Arctic or Antarctic ice melts, Then won't the heat go plunging into the ocean where, as far as I understand, it sits for about 800 years before coming back out?
Yeah, it's extraordinary.
I've oversimplified, so it's extraordinarily complicated because there's also some other... One could argue that to some extent the ice may be insulating the underlying ocean.
It could get absorbed by the oceans and captured in a way that it There's a lot of things that could happen.
Let me give a second example.
Think of it as snow cover than in Canada.
Like this year in Britain, I don't know if anybody saw the pictures, but they had this marvelous satellite picture of the entire main British Isle being completely white.
Totally covered in snow the first time anybody could remember that for for quite a number of years and from space it was What was was very distinctive you can think of you know the British Isles on those days?
Reflecting a lot more sunlight and heat back into space than they were on the days when there wasn't snow cover So that's that's the basic theory another example is Remember I told you that We should talk about the main one.
Everything else is trivial compared to water vapor.
So let's talk about water vapor.
I told you a while ago that CO2 wasn't a very good greenhouse gas.
It's actually very weak.
Water is a much stronger greenhouse gas.
So the theory, one amplification theory, Is that as the world warms from CO2, or any other initial warming, but from CO2, the heat vaporizes more water out of the oceans.
And at the same time, the amount of moisture that air can hold goes up as its temperature goes up.
As air gets warmer, it can hold on to more water vapor, more moisture.
And so its carrying capacity, you can think of that as moisture, is higher.
That's actually why we have both humidity measure, which is how much moisture is in the air, but we usually use relative humidity, which is how much moisture is in the air relative to its total carrying capacity, and that total carrying capacity changes with temperature.
So the theory is that as the world warms, the oceans warm, lakes warm, rivers warm, That vaporizes more air vapor into the water.
The air is warmer.
It can carry more of that vapor.
And that with more water vapor in the atmosphere, that water vapor is a very strong greenhouse gas.
So now we have initial warming creating more greenhouse gases, more water vapor in the air.
And that water vapor causes a lot more warming because it's a very strong greenhouse gas.
And that extra warming is recursive.
It goes in an infinite loop.
That warming causes even more warming, because that second amount of warming causes more water vapor to go up in the air, which causes even more warming, etc., etc., etc.
Two objections pop into my mind, which I'm sure have been dealt with at least tangentially by the community that proposes this stuff.
The first, of course, is that clouds are themselves a reflective substance, kind of like lower-density ice or glaciers in terms of reflecting heat back into the air.
That would sort of be the first one that would come to mind which might limit some of that.
The second, of course, is that if small degrees increases in general temperatures cause this kind of escalation, then why haven't we seen it before at times during the medieval warm period and so on when we had exactly this kind of stuff?
Why didn't that escalate into the planet is on fire?
Right.
And I can't answer the second because that's a very good question.
The first one, your first question I think is the most important In my mind, the most important climate question that is unsolved is, how does the extra water vapor manifest itself in a climate system, in a warmer, cooler climate system?
Because you're absolutely right, it's actually even more complicated than that, because low clouds, like big fluffy cumulus clouds that cause storms and things like that, the big fluffy cumulus clouds cause a lot of cooling and reflect a lot of
Sunlight back into space and cause a lot of cooling and they just we all know that clouds cause shade and it's cooler in the clouds We certainly know that in Phoenix But actually high clouds big cirrus clouds way up the wisp that's big the wispy cirrus clouds way up in the air They actually can caught or thought by some to cause warming because they can actually trap more heat Than they actually reflect so and I'm not an expert on that but so the one thing I am that I do know is
And then it gets even more complicated than that because actually we're not seeing the, you know, we're actually seeing a decline in relative humidity over the last 30 or 40 years.
So we're seeing far less water vapor go into the air as humidity than would be expected in the climate model.
So there's a lot of stuff not proving out.
But we can just take a step back instead of trying to give the answer here.
I can just say this is The most important and totally unsolved question, no matter what anybody tells you, nobody really has a good feeling for the answer on what the net effect of water vapor is in a warming world, and what the net feedback is.
And really, it's a critical question.
Really, we can talk about greenhouse gas theory all we want and try to put a finer point on it, but it's irrelevant, because You know, a forecast of, say, Joe Rom here in the United States gives one up to 10 degrees Celsius.
Well, a 10 degree Celsius forecast is really one degree of global warming from greenhouse gases multiplied 10 times by these water vapor feedback effects.
Would you rather spend your time Messing around, getting the one degree to the last decibel point?
Or would you rather go figure out if ten times is really right?
Because a lot of us think it's not even greater than one, the number's actually less than one.
In fact, in every natural system that I know of in the world that's stable, as you've been making the point for millions or billions of years, the feedback number's less than one.
The initial input is actually damped.
It's like trying to push your car, not from the top of the hill, but trying to push your car, you know, in a flat parking lot and having to just strain and strain and strain to even make the thing move.
And most natural processes are like that, you know.
Or else, if they weren't, we'd have perpetual motion machines all around us.
Yeah, I mean, it's like a pendulum.
It may swing if the wind blows or somebody taps it, but it's going to return to a point of equilibrium because of gravity.
All complex systems have competing and balancing forces like the free market or price or whatever.
Right, exactly.
And of course, if they say, well, a one degree increase in temperature overall leads to an ever escalating increase in temperatures towards catastrophe, again, just to return to my point, that does not explain why that did not occur during the medieval warm period where you had more than that.
And even better than that is, one of the things I do in my video is I take those future forecasts from the IPCC says it's going to be three or five degree warming over the next hundred years and other folks say it's eight or ten degrees and I take those forecasts and one of the great I don't have the science to solve the water feedback question.
That's a very complicated observational problem.
And fortunately, because of space technology, we've been putting a lot of new technology into space that I think is going to answer this problem in five years.
like Roy Spencer, that think they're already getting to that answer, and it's a lot lower feedback number than anybody using.
But nevertheless, I think that problem's going to be solved.
But the one thing I can do is just reality check and say, well, whatever the feedback number is, whatever the physics are, if they're going to exist in the future, they had to exist in the past.
Nobody's implying that there's any step change in the physical laws of the Earth occurring around this time.
And so, what I did is I took those future forecasts and projected them backwards and said, "Well, what do I have to believe based on the formula, "based on how you have to look at the curve "because it's not straight.
"You can't just linear project them back.
"You have to project them on a logarithmic curve.
"But what do I have to believe to say "to believe a 10-degree forecast over the next few years, "the classic catastrophic forecast?
Well, if it's going to be 10 degrees in 100 years, if I project that back, it says that based on the CO2 we've already added to the atmosphere, it has to have already been 4 degrees since 1850.
Well, we haven't seen 4 degrees since 1850.
We've seen the thermometers say it's been 6 or 7 tenths, and we argue that that may be high because it's got biases and poor corrections in there.
But even if it's 6 or 7 tenths of a degree, We're not seeing anywhere near the kind of warming that we would have to see to be consistent with these high-sensitivity, high-feedback forecasts.
In fact, the warming we've seen in the past is far more consistent with a neutral-to-negative feedback regime, unless the warming's hiding somewhere.
And I don't know where it's hiding.
People actually use those words in media interviews.
Well, the warming's hiding.
You know, it'll come out.
You know, that's crazy talk.
I mean, the only place you can be hiding in the deep oceans, and we've actually added a lot of really interesting tools to measure the ocean heat content.
The ocean heat content has been dead flat for the last, since 2003 when we put these two tools in place.
So you just can't make history consistent with these high feedback forecasts.
They make no sense.
You have to assume that somehow physics changed in 1999 to make these forecasts have any sense going back historically.
Well, it's important to remember that physics might not have been Y2K compatible.
That's right.
Yeah, I know, the physics... The climate crashed in 2000, and we got, you know... It was written in Y2K with only two digits for the dates, and, you know, that's just not a good language to write your physics in, but... Now, I wanted to just sort of finish up, and I really appreciate your time here, but I really wanted to finish up with what I think is really the most important aspect, and
I don't know about you, but certainly for me, one of the reasons that I'm very invested in looking at the skeptical side, to sort of give my bias out in front of the open.
It's something that you, I think, had a very powerful way of looking at in your 07 presentation, which is the protection of the future wealth of the planet.
It is my strong belief that things like ending war and poverty and terrorism and so on have a lot to do with generating additional wealth, particularly over this century.
Unfortunately, the spread of wealth throughout the world has not matched our capacity to create weapons of mass destruction and torture facilities and other nefarious schemes.
The final aspect of all of this is if we assume that it's carbon dioxide is the smoking gun, if we assume that it's anthropogenic, if we assume that is catastrophic, that still does not prove that government intervention in an economy crippling kind of way is the way to solve the problem.
And you had, and I'll let you talk about the numbers if you recall them, you had a very powerful way of looking at the three-and-a-half versus two-and-a-half percent growth over the twentieth century based upon whether or not we allow governments to come in and undercut the economic expansion or growth of the future based upon fears of these kinds of catastrophes.
I'm wondering if you could touch upon that because I think that is why this is so important.
There are literally millions of lives at stake in the global warming question because the growth of wealth is the growth of things like uh... you know protection from cholera and dysentery uh... running water uh... medical care of enough food and so if we don't allow the economy to grow as much as it could have you know trillions and trillions of dollars and millions and millions of lives are at stake which is why i think this issue is so fundamentally important yeah it's The numbers are staggering.
Let me just take, before I get to the numbers projecting forward, just two quick other points on the topic.
One thing that everybody needs to understand is You need to go sometime and take a medieval history course to understand the disconnect, because I actually am fascinated by medieval history, so I take a lot of courses on it.
And the professors, every time they talk about the High Middle Ages, they have to deprogram the audience, because they say, I know you've all been trained that warming was bad, but I'm going to tell you that the warming period That existed from the year 1000 to 1200 was the most prosperous time for a thousand years.
that European populations dropped from 600 to 1,000, and they dropped from 1,200 to 1,500.
And the only time European population was growing, and they were growing a lot of food and had plenty, and there was prosperity, was during this very warm period of the Middle Ages.
So the first thing to recognize is historically, certainly if we all raised 10 degrees, that would clearly be a problem because man wasn't evolved, and civilization didn't evolve for temperatures like that.
But warming of the magnitude of a couple degrees has always led to prosperity, and we've seen that time and time again in history.
The second thing I would say is you can really see, even for natural, because they talk about global warming causing natural disasters, and we could probably not get on to all that, but you should know, by the way, just take one thing because it's talked about all the time, hurricanes.
Global warming so far has had almost nothing to do with hurricanes.
Supposedly, with all the CO2 in the air, in 2009 was the lowest hurricane year worldwide in history, not just by counting hurricanes, which is a flawed way to do it, but looking at the total energy in all the cyclones worldwide.
This is a very low year for hurricanes.
But people will talk about hurricanes, and my reaction is always, geez, you know, it might add one or subtract one for it's a little warmer, but those numbers in terms of lives and property damage are trivial compared to the impact of wealth in allowing people to survive such natural disasters.
I mean, we have natural disasters in this country, even Katrina, that are where, yes, there's damage and a lot of dislocated lives and a few people died, but the catastrophe and lives is trivial compared to similar storms when they hit these poor countries.
That the best defense against severe weather is not changing CO2, it's making everybody rich.
And I hate to, I don't want to take advantage of, in my argument, of people suffering, but you can look at Haiti going on right now.
I mean, you see, whenever you see these earthquakes, you can see similar sized earthquakes And the difference in the death toll, the devastation between when they happen in a poor country like Haiti and when they happen in a wealthy nation are staggering.
Which says, why are we messing around with a few tenths of concentration of CO2 to maybe change the number of hurricanes plus or minus one?
When the key to having people survive severe weather and prosper even in severe weather is wealth.
And the example I gave that you're referring to in my presentation has actually looked I wish I'd looked it up.
If you have it in front of you, you can give the exact number.
But I looked at the difference over 100 years.
People say, well, you know, fighting global warming might only knock off, you know, it might knock a percentage off economic growth.
Now, I think that's actually crazy, because I don't think there's any way you can obsolete the entire fossil fuel infrastructure of the world in the next 30 years and only reduce
Economic growth by 1% I mean, that's just that's just crazy talk because it's just it's just not I mean We're talking about going to levels of co2 per capita that we had last in this country in the 19th century But anyway, even accepting if it was only 1% I looked at the difference in and what the the total worldwide GMP would be if you went at two and a half percent growth rate and a three and a half percent growth rate and you're talking about I wish I had in front of me.
The difference was in the tens of trillions of dollars.
I mean, it was a staggering difference.
Even small changes in worldwide growth rates make to the prosperity and wealth of the people of the world, you know, a hundred years from now.
And I think a far... It was two and a half times.
We will be two and a half times wealthier with an additional percentage point over a hundred years of economic growth.
And two and a half times is completely staggering.
Obviously, it's staggering in the first world, But it's even more staggering when you start to look at some of the developing countries and what that kind of growth would mean to them in terms of being able to build structures that would be able to survive earthquakes and hurricanes and other kinds of extreme weather phenomenon or build levees to protect areas that might be threatened by rising sea levels and so on.
Absolutely.
The best thing to do is to throw as much money into the coffers of society and then society can deal with things if and when they occur.
I tell you, the well-being... By impoverishing society is a very bad way of approaching it, in my opinion.
I tell you, the well-being of folks in Africa right now have a lot more to do with burning every molecule of fossil fuels they can get their hands on, because it's power that lets them treat their water, it's power that lets them pump clean water to new places, it's power that runs their hospitals, it's power that brings business, that people can actually get some prosperity.
And I'm a little older, but when I grew up, Southeast Asia was like Africa.
I mean, really.
Nowadays we think of these as growing, prosperous countries, but some of these countries that are now we think of as growing and prosperous, even in my lifetime were hopeless, poverty-stricken basket cases like countries in Africa were.
It is not hopeless for the poor of the world, but trying to adopt Rich people, we're going to hate what we would have to do to meet these CO2 targets, and it would be devastating for this economy, but people in the United States are probably going to be easiest to do it.
are really rich people's toys at this point.
Solar and wind.
And I would love it someday if solar panels... I live in Phoenix.
There's nothing in the whole world I would love more than solar panels being printed off in huge sheets like carpet coming out of Dalton, Georgia and sold at the Home Depot for a buck a foot and I can cover my roof in it and power my house.
And that's going to happen someday and I'm going to be thrilled when it happens.
But it is not here now.
And the kinds of technologies are Both unreliable and atrociously expensive and they're not ones, and there may be ones that we can afford in this country and in Canada, but they're not ones that you can build development off of in Africa.
It's just not realistic.
And so you're talking about a choice of right now, what I often tell people is we're sitting at the cusp.
A historic cusp in history.
If you look at China, you look at India, you look at Southeast Asia.
Unfortunately, it's not really happening in Africa.
I'd love to see it happen in Africa.
You look at parts of South America.
There are perhaps a billion people where the previous generation whose life and whose poverty looked no different than somebody who lived in the same spot a thousand generations ago.
We're talking about a billion people right now who are in the process of pulling themselves out of poverty and into the middle class.
And in my mind, that is such a critical, important thing for humanity that it would be a travesty to derail that on a misguided search to try to influence the weather by small changes in CO2 concentration.
Right.
I always try to personalize this kind of stuff myself so that I can get to the real moral implications, which is, I think, what we're talking about in terms of state action to control these emissions.
Which, of course, there's very strong arguments to be made that even if it is a problem, it's far too late anyway.
The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is such that even if we cut it all off tomorrow, it's not going to make a damn bit of difference over the next couple of decades to a century.
But even if we accept all of that, I myself would not have the guts or the callousness to stand in front of somebody in China or India or even Africa and say, sorry, you can't have clean running water and your child is going to face the risk of dysentery, diarrhea and death because I'm afraid that some scientist's modeling is going to predict another earthquake or two or another
volcano or two or another cyclone or two and so I'm afraid you're gonna have to live with that risk that your child is going to die because some computer model says that things may get bad although there's no proof for it.
I could not stand in front of somebody and say that and if I can't do that I really can't support the moral position in the abstract if I can't do it personally.
Yeah, and the difference in the risk profile is tremendous.
I mean, we have these computer models that I think there's tremendous problems with, and there's tremendous problems trying to predict, you know, what's going to happen to temperatures for a hundred different reasons.
And so there's a whole kind of continuum of possibilities.
But on the flip side, there's a near certainty.
I mean, because you're talking about the near certainty that Trying to purge the world of fossil fuels in the next 20 or 30 years, it's a near certainty that you're going to halt or reverse the development for billions of people, and you're going to make the nations already wealthy poorer in the process.
And that's not a risk profile.
That's not a possibility.
That's a lock.
People talk about this precautionary principle and that we should bow down and do whatever we wish based on even a small risk of catastrophic things happening.
But from my mind, the result of really following through on these CO2 targets is itself catastrophic.
Maybe not catastrophic world ending for us that are wealthy and happen to live in wealthier nations, but for the majority of the world's population, we're talking about something that's truly catastrophic.
It was in my lifetime.
That there were still massive famines and we thought everybody in India was going to starve.
I mean, you can't really picture that today, this notion that people in India and China are going to starve because those seem like up and coming and prosperous nations.
But it was in my lifetime that That was happening.
It was a real possibility of even further disasters in the future.
We're talking about derailing the progress they made and sending them back to that state.
You're right.
I don't know how I would consider myself a humanitarian to make that choice.
The frank reality is that without the expansion of wealth, or even if, as you say, the expansion of wealth is slowed, Millions of lives hang in the balance because that wealth does buy protection from disease and starvation and other kinds of predations.
Millions of lives hang in the balance and it seems extraordinarily vain and narcissistic for us to say that well there's a big risk to us because sea levels might rise or there might be some additional storms.
To focus on that rather than the millions of lives in the developing world that hang upon the expansion of this kind of wealth seems to me extraordinarily narrow-minded, narcissistic and frankly Callous to the point of outright immorality and I think it's something that we don't really hear a lot of in this debate.
The degree to which the decisions that we're making are going to have extraordinarily catastrophic events in the third world and it's just it's something that needs to be brought up to the front of the debate because if you don't look at the hidden costs which really not that hidden you really have to almost close your eyes to avoid seeing them.
People aren't going to be able to make the right decisions and to me when millions of lives hang in the balance The standard of proof has to be pretty damn high for us to take significant collective action, and the standard of proof is all over the map.
It's conjectural, it's modeled, it's tainted by money which goes towards funding scare stories, it's tainted by admitted biases on the part of the researchers, both in terms of You know, well we have to be alarmist, we have to oversimplify, we have to hide the decline.
There's a huge amount of bias and conjecture and massive problems with the data.
They can't even predict the past, let alone the future.
There's no science that proves that all of these disasters are going to occur.
And so for me the standard of proof isn't even high enough to buy a penny stock, let alone commit the lives of millions to possible death as a result of these conjectures.
I agree, and that's why I started my site and tried to make the issue clear for folks.
I think 2009 turned out to be a good year for skeptics.
I think we haven't won the debate by any means.
I think 2009 turned out to be a good year for skeptics.
I think we haven't won the debate by any means.
We're still behind on points in the debate.
But I think we finally kind of got a seat at the table at least that it's been acknowledged that maybe it's worth listening to what we're saying and that we might be saying some intriguing things about this.
And so I'm encouraged in this – I mean it would be easy to discourage myself in the state of the debate, but I'm encouraged in the state of the debate.
I really think we had a turning point in 2009 where we made some progress getting our points on the table, and we're going to keep trying to do that as we get a little more of an audience and a little more openness to hear.
Yeah, well truth is just a matter of time, persistence and accuracy, and those of us who've been beating this drum for many years, it's good to see the debate shift.
And I think you're right, 2009 was a fantastic year.
for at least bringing the possibility of debate back.
And once the possibility of debate comes back, then the most rational and consistent side will always win in the long run.
But where there is no debate, we have trouble.
But I think the debate is reopening.
I really wanted to thank you so much for your time here.
I know it was a long interview, but you have so many great things to say.
I just wanted to put out your website again.
It's climate-skeptic.com.
And you also run coyoteblog.com, is that right?
I do.
That's more of a business and economics blog.
Right, and you know, do a search for these videos on YouTube.
There are also a number of links to them on climate-skeptic.com.
Well worth looking at it.
I mean, the graphs will do a lot more to show you what the reality is versus us, you know, chattering heads.
But have a look at this stuff.
It's really, really important to educate yourself.
This is a huge, huge issue for our time.
And as they say, millions of lives hang in the balance about what it is we're going to do here.
And we need to really look at this data and these arguments with an incredibly critical and skeptical scrutiny because the consequences of making the wrong decisions will be borne by us and our children to a small degree but by the lives of others around the globe by an enormous degree so I really would encourage you to dig into this information and find out and do not be afraid even though you run into perhaps some scorn or skepticism about your skepticism You know, just hang tough and be strong in the case of this debate.
It's a huge service to humanity, to those who need the wealth that the free market can create.
Those who need the opportunities that a lack of government control over essential energy, which is the lifeblood of mankind as it grows upwards through the economic ladder.
Those people desperately need, those of us who have a voice, who have the education, who have the eloquence to speak out loudly and strongly, they really need us.
And so I just really would encourage people to speak out loud and strong about this and to really invite people to look at the data for themselves and where it's strong and in particular where it's weak, which is a significant hole that we can't skirt around.
Thank you very much for having me!
Alright, I will send you a copy of this and I will talk to you soon.
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